Texas: Sixth District

Rep. Joe Barton (R)

Joe Barton (R) Elected 1984, 12th term up
Born:	09-15-1949, Waco
Home:	Ennis
Education:	Texas A&M U., B.S. 1972, Purdue U., M.S. 1973
Religion:	United Methodist
Marital Status:	married (Terri)
Professional Career:	Asst. to V.P., Ennis Business Forms, 1973–81; White House Fellow, U.S. Dept. of Energy, 1981–82; Consultant, Atlantic Richfield Co., 1982–84.
DC Office	2109 RHOB, 20515 202-225-2002 Fax: 202-225-3052 Website: joebarton.house.gov
State Offices	Arlington:817-543-1000; Crockett:936-544-8488; Ennis:817-543-1000;
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The Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex—yes, the name is part of everyday speech there—has spread outward from its historic nodes in downtown Dallas and Fort Worth. Although Dallas is the larger population center, much of the development has moved west, across the dusty plains where one crosses the barely perceptible Balcones Escarpment, the geologist’s boundary between green and grassy East Texas and the brown, barren and hilly West. This was empty territory a few decades ago; now it has mostly been filled in, with subdivisions and shopping centers that leave some feeling of the shape of this land under the enormous Texas sky. The biggest city here is Arlington, once seemingly all suburban, home to a General Motors assembly plant since 1954 and newer all-American attractions like Six Flags over Texas, Hurricane Harbor, and the Ballpark in Arlington, commissioned by the former part-owner of the Texas Rangers, George W. Bush. But this is not just white bread suburbia anymore. Arlington’s population of 360,000 in 2005 was 24% Hispanic, 17% black and 5% Asian; just a couple miles south of Six Flags is a mixed Latino-Vietnamese area with Mexican restaurants and Asian delis. Arlington provides extra pay to police officers who can speak Spanish or Vietnamese. Arlington today is mostly developed; the big growth now comes to the south in Crowley and Mansfield, where the population has increased dramatically since 2000. Growth in the area has been so robust that Tarrant County, the third-largest county in Texas, was in 2004 the 18th largest in the country, just ahead of New York County (Manhattan), and just behind Clark County (Las Vegas).

The 6th Congressional District of Texas includes all of Arlington and the southern fringe of Fort Worth to the west. Two-thirds of its people live in Arlington and Tarrant County. Much of the rest are in Ellis County, directly south of Dallas County, which also has been growing rapidly. The district includes all or part of six counties running to the southeast, most of the way to Houston. Politically, this territory was ancestrally Democratic for many years; all of it voted for John F. Kennedy over Richard Nixon in 1960. But those days are gone. In 2004, the 6th District voted 66% for George W. Bush.

The congressman from the 6th District is Joe Barton, a Republican first elected in 1984. Barton grew up in Ennis, in then rural Ellis County just south of Dallas. He graduated from Texas A&M and Purdue, worked as an oil company engineer and was a White House Fellow. When Phil Gramm ran for the Senate in 1984, Barton ran for his 6th District House seat, and won the Republican runoff by only 10 votes and the general with 57% of the vote. At first, Barton had two great causes, one defunct, the other successful—in a way. The first was the superconductor Supercollider, an enormous scientific laboratory that was to have been built in Waxahachie, in Ellis County. In retrospect this was a purely Texas project, alive only so long as George H.W. Bush was president; despite Barton’s efforts, the House voted 282–143 to zero it out in 1993. His other cause has been sponsorship of a constitutional amendment requiring a two-thirds vote to raise taxes. When the House took up the issue in early 1995, leadership whispered there was no way the tax limitation measure could win the needed 290 votes. In fact it got 253. Barton claimed progress across the country, where many states approved tax-limitation plans. But the budget surpluses starting in 1998 followed by Republican governance changed the conversation, and the amendment has been mostly forgotten. Although he remains a solid conservative, he sometimes strays toward the center on cultural issues.

In 1995 Barton became chairman of the Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigation Subcommittee and conducted extensive hearings on food and drug laws. These resulted in enactment, with bipartisan support, of significant FDA modernization, encouraging the agency to more quickly review innovative drugs and medical devices. In 1999 he became chairman of the Energy and Power Subcommittee. His subcommittee had jurisdiction over various Bush energy plans, which Barton generally supported. He surprised some by reaching agreement in 2001 with Michigan Democrat John Dingell on higher fuel economy standards. All the while, Barton pressed for action on electricity regulation. He retreated from requiring utilities to join regional transmission organizations and sought to encourage them to do so, to produce an easy basis for exchanges of traded electricity. His version repealed the 1930s Public Utility Holding Company Act. This was an issue on which a Republican like Barton tried to increase federal regulatory power while Democrats like John Dingell and Henry Waxman were maintaining state primacy. In September 2002, Republicans pushed it through the House. But it went no farther.

In February 2004, Energy and Commerce chairman Billy Tauzin announced he would retire from Congress; Barton was selected to succeed him as chairman—the only Texan other than Sam Rayburn to hold the post. He said he wanted to focus on investigations, as Dingell had when he was chairman from 1981 to 1995. He aroused partisan feelings sometimes, as when in September 2004 he blocked committee Democrats’ demand for information on Dick Cheney’s 2001 energy task force. But he also worked successfully to win Democratic votes on some issues and to defend and expand the committee’s jurisdiction. Not all his efforts were successful. In November 2004 he said he would no longer grant committee members waivers to serve on other committees; several, including some who had seats on Financial Services to follow their issues when the committee jurisdictions were altered in 2001, protested, and Barton issued waivers on a case-by-case basis. Conflicts with other committees are inevitable on Energy and Commerce. Barton clashed with Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner on database privacy; a founder of the Congressional Privacy Caucus, Barton pushed a bill seeking consumers’ access to information; Sensenbrenner backed one allowing less access, which was backed by content providers.

Telecommunications issues are a major responsibility of Energy and Commerce. Barton and Chip Pickering asked the FCC to assert jurisdiction over VoIP Internet phoning. After Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” during the 2004 Super Bowl broadcast, the committee voted to increase the fines on broadcast indecency. Barton tried to put the bill raising the maximum fine for one incident from $32,500 to $500,000 in the defense authorization. That failed, but the House passed the bill in February 2005. In June 2006, the House passed his bill to make it easier for telephone companies to enter the broadband market; but influential Democrats opposed the measure, and it died in the Senate. Barton called for a stand-alone bill to require broadcasters to return the analog spectrum to the government by the end of 2006; existing law allowed them to delay until 85% of households have digital TV. In January 2007, he said that remaining analog TVs for sale should have a warning label for consumers.

On the energy bill, Barton insisted on retaining provisions barring liability of the manufacturers of MTBE, the fuel additive that federal regulations encouraged oil companies to put in gasoline; that provision prevented passage in the Senate in 2003. While he seemed to despair of a comprehensive energy bill, the Bush administration and Senate Energy Chairman Pete Domenici kept pressing. Barton still seemed wary of provisions that might kill the bill in the Senate. He called for keeping oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge out of the bill and he removed immunity for MTBE manufacturers; each was a bitter pill for Barton and his allies, and a measure of the limitations that they faced. But Barton was pleased and took some credit when the bill was enacted in August 2005, with $12 billion in incentives, an inventory of oil and natural gas reserves, plus a one-month extension of daylight savings time. In October 2005, the House narrowly passed Barton’s bill to encourage the construction of new refineries, but it died in the Senate. He has been an ardent skeptic of global-warming claims of environmentalists and climate scientists. At a September 2006 hearing, he led the criticism of British Petroleum for its pipeline leaks in Alaska.

Energy and Commerce is a great platform for generating contributions, and Barton raised much more money than he is ever likely to need to spend in his district. In June 2004 he hosted a fundraiser for Billy Tauzin III, who was running for his father’s seat, as Tauzin had hosted a fundraiser for Barton’s son when he ran for Congress (both sons lost). At home he was criticized by Democrats for seeking in 2003 and 2004 to keep Ellis County outside EPA’s Dallas region for purposes of the Clean Air Act; Ellis County is home to three cement producers and other companies whose PACs or executives contributed to Barton’s campaigns, and the county produces 40% of the industrial emissions in North Texas. Barton said there was no connection between the contributions and his action and argued that there was no scientific basis for Ellis County’s inclusion. But in April 2004, the EPA decided otherwise and that Ellis County must work to reduce air pollution.

Barton has had some political disappointments. He ran for the Senate in 1993 after Lloyd Bentsen resigned to be Treasury secretary but finished third with just 14% of the vote in the May all-party primary. In September 2001, when Phil Gramm announced his retirement from the Senate, Barton considered running for his seat. But in early October, busy with electricity and energy legislation and amid talk that the Bush White House favored Attorney General John Cornyn, he announced he would not run. After the 2006 election, he made a belated bid for Minority Leader. But he quickly discovered that John Boehner had wrapped up the votes, and Barton withdrew after six days; although he has become their dean, his failure to alert them in advance caused resentment among Texas Republicans.

Barton has been reelected easily in the 6th District. He suffered a heart attack in December 2005, but quickly recovered.

Committees

• Energy & Commerce (RMM of 26 R).
  

Presidential Vote

District Demographics (More Info)

• Cook Partisan Voting Index: R +15
• Area size: 6,336 square miles
• Urban Population: 80.0%
• Rural Population: 20.0%
• Population 2000: 651,619
• Population 2005 (est): 738,288
• Median Income: $45,857
• Poverty Status: 10.4%
• Military Veterans: 12.4%
• Race/Ethnic Origin: 65.8% White; 12.8% Black; 3.4% Asian; 0.4% Native Am.; 0.1% Hawaiian; 1.5% Two+ races; 0.1% Other; 15.9% Hispanic Origin;
• Ancestry: 8.7% German%; 8.6% USA%; 7.3% Irish%;
• Occupation: Blue collar 24.1%; White collar 62.4%; Gray collar 13.5%;